Consumers Vs. Algorithms

February 13,2018

When Google released Panda in 2011, it started a new era in the direction Google was heading towards. About a year later Google released it second major update after Panda, which would later be called Penguin. To SEO companies, this update would be known as the “web spamming update.”

Now you may be wondering what web spamming is and how companies benefit from this. Web spamming is a tactic used by SEO companies to manipulate Google search results that would created a false quality of a website. In simple terms, it was used to increase the rank position of a website. As you probably know, where your website ranks in search engines could have a dramatic impact on organic views and possibly an increase in business.

The release of Penguin was further confirmation to SEO companies that Google was dedicated to improving user experience on their search engine. Prior to Penguin the ultimate goal was to get your website’s ranking to page 1 and position 1. The most popular manipulation forms that companies did were link scheming and keyword stuffing.

One way link scheming was accomplished was through buying links and directing their destination to a website. This would create false traffic to your website and trick Google into thinking that your website is driving better traffic than other sites. Before Penguin, Google put great emphasis on traffic to websites for the simple reason that they associated high traffic with high quality. Link scheming successfully accomplished this false sense of traffic and was heavily practiced by SEO companies.

Keyword stuffing was another spamming tactic that SEO companies used to their benefit. Google refers to keyword stuffing as, “The practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results.” Another major factor&nbsp in Google's ranking system, prior to this era, was the relevance of a website. Google gathered all of the content in a website and determined what that websites main theme was based on that content. This demonstrates why keyword stuffing was a popular practice. Essentially, the more words that you had in your content, the better Google would translate that content into its search results page.

Penguin was a major update that changed the focus of SEO companies from writing content for the algorithm to writing content for the consumer. Here at AppSoft our goal is the make our clients websites show up in the top position on search engines and our dedicated team will work hard to make this goal a reality for your website. Call us at (904)-551-4700 to start growing your business today!